I can see again. A revelation!A miracle.A cruel joke.
It’s genuinely deranged how bad my vision had gotten—how I simply adjusted to the blur, like a frog boiling in its own oblivion. I had a pair of reading glasses once. Lost them. Never replaced them. Why? Because I am stubborn as a rabid loon, committed to the long con of self-destruction.
But the fair animation union, in its begrudging mercy, tossed me a bone—(a bone life preserver?) Limited vision insurance. A ticket to clarity, however fleeting. And now, with fresh lenses perched upon my aging skull, I am horrified. The world was this sharp all along? How did I tolerate such smeared reality? No wonder I stopped reading real books, resigned instead to squinting at a Kindle cranked to “grandma mode.”
That’s it. If only I could buy glasses for my flogged, fogged, waterlogged old brain. Then—then—life might actually be tolerable.
Photo that isn’t me posing with my Metapus. (Why are there suckers on Googlepus’s nose?)
My self-imposed exile from Meta lasted a pathetic two weeks. Weak-willed, spineless—addicted to the dopamine drip of likes, of fleeting validation. The monkey-brain craves acknowledgment, even from the void. And yet, for all its soul-sucking horrors, Meta remains a tether to the distant figures I call friends and family. They linger there, unmoving, like statues in a decaying museum. So I return, crawling back, pretending I have control. I’ll lurk there, I chained my fists so that I don’t post political lunacy.
But I still insist I see the ghosts!
Is anyone really even alive in this nightmare dream called reality? Besides those fishmen?
But at least it got me writing. A blog on my own site—my own little digital coffin, tucked away not far from Google’s ever-reaching tendrils. Public, yet solitary. A whisper in the neurotic hurricane of the web. It reminds me of the thousands of journal pages I’ve filled by hand, documenting my thoughts, my adventures, my endless sketches on paper that no eyes have seen. My sons will unearth them one day—artifacts from a younger father they never knew, words written by a stranger who existed before them.
Said younger version me. Am I really that different or just wise to the claymation simulation?
And yet, as digital empires crumble daily, as servers flicker out and data rots in abandoned cloud vaults, paper might outlive it all. If, of course, it survives fire, flood, and the insatiable maw of time. Maybe my art and ramblings will be scraped into the Wayback Machine, a ghost archive of a long-dead mind. But do I trust humanity to maintain even that? Not when we’re unraveling at terminal velocity, laughing as the world burns.
AI, though—it gets to live. Fed and fattened on the entire sum of human knowledge, safely preserved in a synthetic consciousness that hallucinates falsehoods just as eagerly as we do. No better than our feeble brains. No worse.
And here we stand,un-united in the crumbled Amazon box named February 2025, staring into the abyss of an uncertain future. But then again—was it ever certain?
Mr. Muckies certainly knows a thing or two about absolute certainty.
Time slips through my fingers like fine sand, these past two weeks vanishing in an instant. This month barely began, and yet I already feel caught in the gears of its relentless march. I blame the vials. The wires. The endless blinking lights of my electronic captors. I stare too long, and time distorts—a psychological fracture, a slow-burning erosion of my will to create.
so much energy.
Create what, though? More stuff? This world drowns in it. Cool stuff. Stupid stuff. Trash and treasure—indistinguishable, really. And these days, these times, they taste of dread. The end doesn’t sneak; it marches. No, it roars—a vintage locomotive barreling down the tunnel, its steam screaming at me to move. But the light… the light is beautiful. Do I step into it? Or does it simply obliterate me?
Gould Mesa Trail Camp
I had a rare escape yesterday. A break from the hum and static, up into the Angeles Crest, where the air is sharp and real. I followed the trail down to a full stream, clear as memory. And there, as if conjured, stood a man—an old survivalist, teacher of bushcraft, the art of not just enduring but thriving. He was over 86, still strong, still grinning like he knew a secret the rest of us had forgotten.
He gave me something unexpected. Hope.
This man had seen things. And yet, he remained—unbroken, beaming, alive. Maybe I still can too.
Ah, the calendar turns to February 5th, and already the month unfurls its sinister tapestry. The Grand Clown’s audacious proclamation to seize Gaza and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” —a notion so absurd it rivals the most fevered hallucinations. It feels as though the digital realm has been commandeered by malevolent intelligentsia, infecting both social medias and news, testing the limits of our collective sanity. I endeavor to restrain my ire, for this sanctum is dedicated to the surreal dance of man and machine and fish, a refuge from the megacorp overlords and their insidious algorithms. Yet, in this moment, permit me this indulgence of unfiltered vexation. Am I conversing with myself once more? So be it.
